HebrideanHecate@TriptychTwinsRidesAgain @Chronic-Yonic @Maud_Gonner See this too re thinking were taking...
In 2019, Shahnaz Akhter, a postdoctoral researcher at Warwick University, was chatting to her sister, who mentioned a documentary that had aired on Channel 4 in the mid-1990s. It was about human radiation experiments, including one that had taken place in 1969 in Coventry. As part of an experiment on iron absorption, 21 Indian women had been fed chapatis baked with radioactive isotopes, apparently without their consent. In the early 1960s, Peter Elwood was a young, ambitious epidemiologist living in his native Belfast. After his first few research projects, which he found “absolutely exhilarating”, Elwood started looking into how to tackle a major cause of ill health worldwide: anaemia. Commonly the result of iron deficiency, anaemia is a condition in which the blood produces an insufficient amount of healthy red blood cells, meaning that the organs don’t get enough oxygen-rich blood. The main symptom is fatigue, but in more severe cases it can affect children’s cognitive development, and in pregnant women it can contribute to premature birth and maternal mortality. (Even today, the World Health Organization classifies anaemia as a serious global public health problem.)
In the postwar period, doctors used radiation to treat everything from arthritis to ringworm. By the mid-1950s, it had become clear that exposure increases the chance of developing certain cancers and can cause infertility. The use of radiation was pared back, but medical researchers remained excited about the quick, precise experimentation it offered. This, along with other new technologies such as cell culturing and a massive growth in antibiotics, sparked a sense that medical science might even be able to defeat disease entirely.
Dr Shah, the GP who referred women to the study, was well known in Foleshill. Kalbir remembers him as a friendly man who often visited patients at home. Exactly what Shah told the 21 women he referred for the study is a crucial matter of dispute, and since he died decades ago, it is impossible to ask him. But it would later become clear that at least two of the women went to Shah for advice – regarding migraines in one case, arthritis in another – and believed they were being put on a special diet to diagnose or treat the issue. Kalbir was only seven in 1969, so she has no idea what her mother was told, but she finds it hard to believe her mother fully understood the implications. “There was a lot of trust in doctors,” she said.
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